


Slowed Me From My Ruining

by galfridian



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-11
Updated: 2014-07-11
Packaged: 2018-02-07 06:23:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1888296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/pseuds/galfridian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After SHIELD falls, Sharon Carter joins the CIA and finds herself assigned to track down the Winter Soldier.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slowed Me From My Ruining

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionessvalenti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/gifts).



> Title taken from Hey Rosetta's "We Made a Pact."
> 
> Never-ending gratitude to Jen and Lisa. You two are saints for looking this over in the eleventh hour.

**I.**  
Sharon waits out the aftermath of SHIELD's collapse in a series of miserable, roach-infested motel rooms. She passes time watching the news, tries to understand how something so monstrous could grow inside SHIELD.

At night, she lies facing the window, watching headlights speed past the motel. She sleeps just a few hours each night, dreams of friends and fellow agents staring down the barrel of her gun.

 

Stepping into Peggy's room after those motels is a relief. Someone has helped her aunt move to a chair by an open window. A book is open in her lap, but she's staring at the garden. Peggy's spirit fills the room: books overflowing their shelves, a lifetime of photographs and souvenirs on every surface.

For a moment, it takes Sharon back to her childhood, and Peggy might as well be sitting by a window in the house she used to own. Sharon has seen this sight a hundred times. It's as familiar to her as the image of Peggy with her pants legs rolled up, standing in a stream, pointing to fish and tadpoles as they drift by. When Sharon was little, feet caked with mud as she followed Peggy home, she would picture her aunt running into the battles from her stories. Even now, Peggy's shoulders look like they could bear considerable weight.

Too soon, Peggy notices her, and the moment passes. She smiles, but standing to greet Sharon is a struggle, and she reaches for her hand. "Sharon, it's so good to see you. I saw Steve, did I tell you?" Sharon takes her aunt's hand, struggling to hold her gaze. Peggy may still hold herself like Atlas ready to shoulder the world, but her eyes betray a woman who has lost too many things and who knows she's looking at the end of her road.

"Yes, you told me, Aunt Peggy." She leads Peggy to her bed, propping her up against the pillows, and takes the chair next to her. The weight of what Sharon has come to do has settled uncomfortably in her stomach. She considers not doing it, but she can't imagine what hearing the news from a less sympathetic source might do. So she smiles, taking Peggy's hand again, and lets her aunt think a minute more about Steve Rogers' miraculous return before she says, "I have something to tell you."

 

Peggy's eyes shine with tears but none fall. Instead, she squares her shoulders and asks what's happened since: What will happen to SHIELD? Is Steve okay? Are you sure it was Bucky?

Sharon has fewer answers for her aunt than she'd like.

After a while, Peggy's eyes grow heavy, and her keen focus begins to blur into confusion. Sharon waits until she falls into an uneasy sleep, kisses her head, and slips out.

 

Outside, she pauses on the front steps, taking a moment to clear her head.

Steve Rogers stands at the bottom of the stairs. Sharon isn't surprised. She's heard he's been released from the hospital; Peggy's is an obvious first stop. It's clear, however, that he's surprised to see her. They pause for a minute, studying each other for the first time without any secret identities between them. He glances at the door behind her and seems to come to the right conclusion pretty quickly. "Agent Carter," he says with a nod, ascending the stairs as she descends them.

"Captain Rogers," she replies. At the bottom of the stairs, she turns and adds, "She's sleeping, but she'll be happy to see you when she wakes up."

Rogers pauses, his hand on the door knob. "Is she – does she know?"

"Yes."

Rogers nods again and gives a little wave before he steps through the doorway.

She wonders if he sits in that same bedside chair when he visits Peggy. Does he hold her hand, thinking of the woman who cowered before nothing, regretting the years he's missed? Between them, they have almost all Peggy's years, but alone, so few.

 

 **II.**  
Sharon goes to her apartment for the first time since SHIELD fell. She's been waiting out Interpol and the CIA and anyone else who might want to ransack her things. She hopes the apartment isn't too badly damaged, more for her landlord's sake than her own.

There's a note pinned to the door, seemingly an inquiry from her landlord about late rent, but she recognizes Romanoff's handwriting and quickly decodes the message (coordinates and a time: 10 blocks northwest, 10:00 AM).

The apartment isn't as bad as she expected. Her cabinets and drawers have been emptied and searched, and all her couch cushions and pillows have been cut open. But the carpet and tiling haven't been torn up. Most likely, anyone who came through knew that Sharon had been undercover and that she hadn't kept any valuable intel around.

It doesn't take her long to pack. She doesn't have much of sentimental value, all of it locked away in safety deposit boxes throughout the city, so she packs a duffel bag with clothes and cash. Her personal gun is missing, which doesn't surprise her, but she finds a switch blade still tucked into the lining of a jacket.

She puts her keys and some cash to cover rent and damages in an envelope, sliding it under the landlord's door as she leaves the building. Then she finds a motel a few blocks away from where she's supposed to meet Natasha.

 

The coordinates lead to a park. It's a warm day at the beginning of spring, so the park is full of children and caregivers that have been cooped up all winter. At any moment, groups of people are entering or exiting the park through a single northern gate.

Sharon finds a bench under the shade of a tree, flat against the park's gate, and waits. A pair of daycare vans pull up, and about twenty children pour into the already parked playground. As they run past her, followed by a handful of adults, Natasha slides onto the bench next to her.

"You got my message. Good. I wasn't sure where you were hiding out."

"DC's finest in cheap motels."

"Ah. Of course."

Sharon doesn't ask where Natasha's been staying, because it doesn't matter, and she doubts Natasha would tell her anyway.

A dog runs by, pursued by a horde of children and an exasperated adult. Everything around them seems so normal it's nearly impossible to believe that some of these people might have been struck down just a few days ago.

It's been difficult not to think about that, not to look at people and wonder if they'd been targeted. Had she? Had Peggy? What about the woman she passed on the street, tear-stained face and hunched shoulders? 

She and Natasha don't look at each other much. It's nearing lunchtime now, and there are more people arriving in the park. Their training – who can say if it's habit or instinct now – has taught them to look closely at everyone. After a while, Natasha says, "Have you decided what's next?"

Sharon shrugs. Where does an agent of a discredited, ruined agency go? Whichever agency will take her, she guesses, and she tells Natasha as much. "Why, are you looking to lead a team of assassin-spies?"

Natasha ignores her joke. "You should consider the CIA."

"Why?"

"Fury's request."

And Sharon isn't surprised that Fury is somehow alive. She's heard the rumors – not just about Phil Coulson but about other SHIELD operatives – and Nick Fury isn't exactly a man who walks around without a few tricks up his sleeve.

"Couldn't ask me himself, huh? Being dead must be so time-consuming." Natasha smiles, just a little. "Why the CIA?"

"Eyes and ears, he said." Which makes sense, of course, especially if Fury is considering –

"Is Fury planning to rebuild SHIELD?"

"Didn't ask." Natasha watches two men in suits enter the park with lunches and keeps an eye on them as she talks. "Now that all of SHIELD's secrets are public, other agencies are going to want to clean up the mess – especially if it's a mess they helped make."

"And Fury thinks it'd be good if some of us were the ones doing the cleaning."

"Consider the CIA," Natasha repeats. Then as though they've reached some agreement, she stands and walks away.

 

Initially, the CIA seems pleased to take her. Sharon has been an exemplary agent, and by all appearances, just another cog in the wheel, not a Romanoff or a Coulson or a May. But it becomes clear as she interacts with the other CIA agents that no one trusts her. Sharon isn't surprised when Agent Weiss, her supervising agent, hands her a folder with Bucky Barnes' photo on it.

 

Among the secrets Natasha spilled onto the Internet: SHIELD's suspicion that Captain America's best friend, presumed dead in battle, actually survived and might be the face behind the stories of an assassin called the Winter Soldier. Barnes' ledger has some pretty impressive names in it, including a few Americans and several people considered friends of the country, which makes him a pretty major target.

As for Sharon, well, Peggy Carter's great-niece, raised on stories of the Howling Commandos, including many about Bucky Barnes. She spent a year undercover as Captain America's neighbor. She was at the Triskelion the day Project Insight launched. Sending her after the Winter Soldier seems fitting, even if she's essentially chasing a ghost, and it's another reminder that the CIA won't forget her history anytime soon.

Her orders are simple: Track the Winter Soldier, learn what he's doing and why he hasn't turned himself in, and determine the best way to capture and contain him. She doesn't hear from Fury, although she's sure he must know about the assignment, so she divines his orders in his silence: Track the Winter Soldier, prevent the CIA from making a bigger mess, and for god's sake, don't get caught.

She pores over the dossier that night, memorizing new information and forgotten details and occasionally making corrections to the file – something that gives her a pretty profound sense of satisfaction, if she's honest. The next morning, she boards a flight to New York. She imagines there aren't many clues in his childhood home, and that if he was foolish enough to go there, he hasn't lingered. But it's a place to start.

 

 **III.**  
She's in London the first time it happens. She's waiting in line at a coffee shop a few blocks from her hotel, a bundle of tourism guides tucked under her arm. She's juggling her coffee, scone, and wallet, when a toddler breaks away from his mother and collides into her. She manages not to spill the coffee, at least not on the child, but the scone and tourism guides fall to the floor.

As the toddler's mother pulls him away, Sharon moves to pick up her things. Before she can bend to reach for them, Steve Rogers appears – out of nowhere, she swears – and grabs them. And Sharon wants to laugh, because he doesn't seem to realize whose rescue he's come to until he's handing the brochures and scone to her. Of course, Captain America swoops in to help without thinking, without knowing who he's helping.

But when his eyes meet hers, he freezes. Sharon can see the wheels turning, sees him assessing her. Behind them, an impatient customer clears his throat. Sharon steps out of line, tossing the scone in a nearby trash can. Rogers follows her to the counter with napkins and plastic utensils. "So uh," he says, pulling a handful of napkins out for her. "How are you?"

 _Of course, Captain America can't help making small talk,_ she thinks, imagining him trading pleasantries with HYDRA agents mid-fight. Then she notices he's staring at her, good manners evidently forgotten, and she realizes what he's looking for. More accurately, Sharon realizes _who_ he's looking for her. "I'm not her," she says. "Peggy, I mean. She's my great-aunt. I spent time with her as a kid, but I'm not her."

"I wasn't expecting you to be," he says, polite but undeniably irritated.

They stand there a moment longer, staring. Reading each other, knowing they're being read and not caring. Sharon doesn't know where Rogers picked this up. Maybe he learned from Peggy, whose scrutiny Nick Fury buckles under; maybe he learned out of necessity, first being Captain America and then the man out of time.

But he knows that her training with SHIELD has taught her how to pick people apart. So when she waves her stack of tourist brochures at him and says, "Big Ben and The Eye await," she knows he doesn't believe her, and he knows she isn't going to tell him the truth.

 

Between the airport and the hotel lobby, Sharon has collected more than a dozen travel brochures. Back in her room, she spreads them out on the bed, all opened to their maps. These brochures are great tools for undercover work: a handful of them clutched together give an impression of a simple tourist, but they have maps. With a few select guides, you can map out a city with discretion. It's a particularly useful trick when avoiding computers.

Sharon arranges the guides to map out London. She studies them. She knows that Barnes and Rogers were here together sometime during the war, but she doesn't know London the way she knows other cities. Between other American agencies and Interpol, SHIELD kept its involvement in England to a minimum, and Sharon has only been on one assignment here before.

She's sure Rogers has come London for the same reason she has. She's actually surprised it took them a few months to cross paths; when she first got the assignment, she had expected it to happen much sooner.

 

Right now, Sharon's tactic is to follow the same information Barnes has access to: documentaries and museum displays, and plaques marking historic sites. Just south of one historic site, noted not for an act of heroism, but a bar the Howling Commandos went to, there's a cluster of dilapidated apartment buildings. The buildings probably haven't changed much since the war – they were abandoned less that ten years after – and they're a great place to not be seen.

She waits until nightfall, rereading the file the CIA gave her and studying her maps.

Her approach to apartment is exemplary – silent, invisible – and she's assessing which of the buildings to check first when gunfire disrupts the night's quiet.

It's coming from a building at the opposite end of estate, and as Sharon approaches, she hears not only gunfire, but the sound of shouting and fighting.

And then, just as suddenly, everything is quiet again. Just as she's about to climb the fire escape, Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson (ex-Air Force, paratrooper, EXO-7 Falcon) round the corner. There's a moment of silence – perhaps stunned on Wilson's part but less so on Rogers', who seems to realize pretty quickly that of course that's why Sharon is here – before the shouts resume.

Three men appear at a window and begin to descend the fire escape, in pursuit of the Winter Soldier, but she knows he's long gone now. Sharon steps back into the shadows, and Rogers and Wilson disappear around the corner.

 

IV.  
Eight months later, Sharon limps into a hostel in Austria, just south of the Bavarian border. Barnes has slipped away again. Several times now, she's come close to reaching him before he disappears, and every time someone has approached him first and sent him running. This time, she had pursued him for a mile through the Austrian mountains, until a pocket of snow shifted under her feet and brought her to the ground. Her ankle is just sore, no sprain or break, fortunately, but the trek back to the hotel had been torturous.

Barnes moves often, slipping between borders with surprising ease, and more than a few times, Sharon has had little to rely on other than than her instinct to follow him. It's clear now that these other people, whoever they are, may need to be dealt with. Otherwise, she may never catch more than a glimpse of him.

She retreats to her bunk, easing her sore ankle onto the bed, and sighs. Thing is, she still isn't sure what she should do if she's ever face-to-face with Barnes. Will he give her a chance to talk, or will he just attack, and how much good will her training do her against someone like that? She has no intention of handing him over to the CIA, although she thinks the agency still believes she will, but can she convince him of that? Best she can figure, Fury wants her to be a liaison between Barnes and the remnants of SHIELD, but first she has to get near him.

Using her good ankle for support, she lifts her body just enough to pull the sheets down on the bed, and as she does, her hand brushes something tucked under the sheets. It's a postcard, a picture of St. Peter's Church in Munich. The message on the back, once again Natasha's handwriting and written in code, suggests she visit her "dear uncle" in Munich. Sharon isn't sure whether the uncle is meant to be Barnes or Fury, but she has no doubt this particular message is from Fury.

Until now, she's been considering returning to Russia. She's visited the place where the Winter Soldier met the Black Widow once before, and there was no hint Barnes had been there, but Sharon feels certain that he'll eventually make a connection between the woman he fought in DC and the woman he shot in Russia.

But there are good reasons for traveling to Bavaria, including the ruins of Castle Zemo, and although SHIELD is gone and she works for the CIA now, Sharon still somehow feels like Fury is her boss.

 

The next afternoon, her ankle has healed well enough to travel, so she packs her few meager belongings and heads for Bavaria.

 

St. Peter's Church is packed with tourists and has more than a few dark corners and corridors to slip into. Of course, she finds Fury in none of those, and instead finds him at the top of the tower. Almost 300 steps, all with an ankle in need of rest, and Sharon is starting to think about all the ways she could hurt Nick Fury now that he isn't her boss, really.

"Tough time in the Alps?" Fury asks, noticing that she's favoring her left ankle.

She grits her teeth, coming to stand beside him and look at the view. It really is incredible, which is one of the few benefits of her job these days, to be honest. "Someone keeps getting ahead of me, scaring him off."

"Rogers?"

Sharon laughs. "If Rogers caught up to him, Barnes would probably still be stuck in a heart-to-heart when I got there. No, whoever these people are, they're making it difficult for both of us to catch him."

"I may have good news then."

"A lead?"

"No. You're being reassigned."

She hadn't expected this. Until now, the CIA has seemed happy to ship her around the world on what's probably a fool's quest. "Why?"

"The CIA is sending several undercover agents into suspected HYDRA footholds. You're being sent to the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. Infiltrate, assimilate, collect intel. You know the routine."

She does. Captain America's neighbor hadn't been her first undercover mission, and until Fury's shooting, it was by far her least dangerous. "Do you know why they're pulling me off the Barnes mission?"

"I don't. But listen, while I'm still standing, someone is watching your back." It's probably the closest thing to affection Fury can muster, and the closest she's had except Peggy for years, and Sharon feels oddly touched. "You'll be pulled out soon. Be ready."

 

 

After her meeting with Fury, Sharon finds a hotel room. Once again armed with travel brochures, she studies Munich, taking an opportunity to rest her ankle. Castle Zemo is less than a day's travel away, but no one been there for decades. Instead, she focuses on a handful of places in Munich that the Howling Commandos were said to be sighted.

She finds a handful of places with potential, marks them on her maps, and heads out. She hasn't followed a lead here, so she isn't expecting to find Barnes, but she wants to keep looking for leads in case she has more time left on this assignment than she thinks.

Night falls faster than she expects, and she still has a few buildings to check. Her ankle is starting to hurt, but she's close to one of the buildings. She has a switch blade and her gun with her, so she presses on.

Unsurprisingly, the building is empty, save for rats. There are signs someone has slept there recently, but whether it was Barnes or a squatter, she can't say for certain. She's examining the make-shift fire-pit when she hears it: the sound of someone with heavy boots walking above her. Then she hears the sound of broken tiles crunching beneath boots.

As the man comes around the corner, she ducks behind a support beam. It isn't much of a hiding spot unless the man decides not to venture further into the room.

But he does. She hears his footsteps growing closer, the click of the safety on his gun. When he reaches the beam, he pauses. As he steps into her sight, something hits him and crumbles to the ground. Captain America's shield falls beside him. The sound of the metal hitting the floor reverberates in the empty building.

Sharon picks up the shield, tests its weight in her hands as Steve Rogers crosses the room to join her. He looks tired, wearied. "What are you doing here?" He asks.

"My job."

"Which is what, exactly?"

She ignores him, instead kneeling to get a closer look at the man. Upstairs, the footsteps have grown heavier, heading toward the stairs. HYDRA. Of course. "Is Wilson here?"

"No, he went to a different location." So they hadn't expected to find Barnes here either, and they definitely hadn't expected the HYDRA agents.

"Let's go," Sharon says, taking the man's gun. Standing, she offers the weapon to Rogers, who shakes his head. "Don't believe in guns?"

"Not as a first measure, no," Rogers replies, shouldering his shield. Behind him, two HYDRA agents step into the doorway. Sharon fires a shot into the agents' shooting arms. She resists the urge to smirk, and Rogers just shrugs. "I didn't say they aren't effective."

Together, they move quietly from the room. Three more HYDRA agents are entering the building, guns raised, and Rogers takes them out much in the way he did the first one.

"You didn't answer my question," Rogers says as they exit the building.

"I didn't answer your question because you know the answer."

Two more HYDRA agents down, also taken out with their own bullets. "You're looking for Bucky."

Sharon can hear the accusation in his tone. It doesn't bother her that he doesn't trust her – he barely knows her, she wouldn't expect him to – but that he's suspicious of her, that's a different thing. "I'm following orders. Don't pretend you don't understand that."

Four more agents, two for Rogers and two for her. She's beginning to think HYDRA must have expected Barnes to be here. "Last time you followed orders, you told me your name was Kate."

"No," she says, dropping the HYDRA agent's empty gun. She pulls her switch blade from her boot and turns to twist it into another agent's shoulder as he attacks her. Behind her, Rogers takes out two agents with his shield. "The last time I followed orders, I pulled a gun on a fellow SHIELD agent. Or at least I thought he was a SHIELD agent."

Rogers stops mid-step. "You were there."

"Yes." A stubborn HYDRA agent struggles to get to his feet. Rogers raises his shield, but Sharon kicks him in the head first. "Let's find Wilson."

 

HYDRA must have been pretty sure of Barnes' location, because Sam Wilson actually looks a little bored when they find him. At the sight of them, more dirty than bruised, he grins. "Rough night?"

 

The CIA agent has made himself comfortable in her hotel room when she arrives. He's sitting on her bed, flipping through the channels on her TV. Beside him, there's a file she hasn't seen before. "You're back," he says, "Finally." He tosses the file at her. "New assignment. You're going to Mexico."

 

 **V.**  
The file the CIA gave her isn't much. It's a little light on intel and a lot light on her cover identity. Reading it the first time, Sharon had wondered whether the CIA was just trying to kill her, and so it isn't much of a surprise when things go to hell about four days in.

She's thrown into a small, windowless room. The floor is covered in dirt. There's a single vent in the ceiling with an opening roughly the size of Sharon's palm. It doesn't take her long to realize that the vent might mean the difference between life and death. It's spring now, almost a year since SHIELD fell and HYDRA rose, but it's still cold in the mountains.

Her thoughts turn to Peggy first. She's hardly been home since being assigned to find Barnes. She calls when she can, but more and more, Peggy doesn't know her when they talk. When she was little, she spent a lot of time with her aunt. Her parents were busy – too busy for her – and although Sharon never doubted that they loved her, she knew they didn't love her enough. Being with Peggy was different. Sometimes, her mother looked through her or looked at her and saw _child, generic_ and not _Sharon, my child_. When Peggy looked her, it was like she was seeing something special.

So Peggy didn't just tell Sharon stories about Captain America or the Howling Commandos or her own adventures. She took her on adventures, showed her tricks for reading people, and when she got older, Peggy taught her how to fight.

For the first time in – well, since the Triskelion last April, and who knows when before that – Sharon is afraid. She's afraid she won't make it home to see Peggy in her last days.

 

Days pass. Sharon finds a loose screw on the vent and uses it to scratch tallies into the wall. For a while, she uses her meals to keep track of time, but then HYDRA figures out that she isn't going to talk – it's not like she has any secrets to reveal anyway – and they start giving her fewer meals.

Sometimes, she thinks she's gotten three meals in a single day; other times, she's not sure whether it was three meals across three days. She keeps making marks every three meals, at least to give her some idea how long it's been.

 

Somewhere around the third month, Sharon starts thinking about Steve Rogers. As far back as Sharon can remember, Peggy's favorite stories to tell had been those about Captain America, but there was an evolution to the way she told those stories.

When Sharon started spending time with Peggy, her aunt always called him "Captain America" in the same tone you'd use when reading about a fictional hero. For a while, Sharon wanted to be Captain America, to magically gain all that strength and courage.

But as she got older, Peggy always called him "Steve," in the same regretful tone her mother used to speak of her first love. Peggy's stories became more about how Steve Rogers became Captain America. And as Sharon began to understand more of what he went through to become the hero, she realized that the serum had only given him the strength, not the bravery.

Around this time, Sharon began to learn more about the war, the things in the history books that Peggy hadn't started to tell her yet, and soon realized that her aunt was just as much a hero as Steve Rogers.

She once made the mistake of telling her mother she wanted to join SHIELD when she grew up, that she wanted to fight for something the way Peggy did; not long after, her parents decided she needed to spend less time with her aunt.

Now, Sharon thinks again about that famous picture of Steve when he enlisted, so small and scrawny he barely filled the frame. She knows Peggy fell in love with him sometime after he became Captain America, but Sharon also knows her aunt wouldn't have loved him if he weren't Steve.

She thinks about what Steve has lost, not just Peggy and Bucky, but an entire life he could have lived. Soon, no one will be left from Steve's generation but him and Bucky. A lesser person would collapse under that weight, but Steve Rogers keeps going.

 

As she falls asleep one night, Sharon wonders when she stopped thinking of him as "Rogers" or "Captain America," wonders when he became "Steve."

 

Sometime later, Sharon wakes abruptly. She pulls herself up off the floor, managing with some difficulty to get on her feet. Somewhere in the HYDRA compound, she hears a series of explosions, followed by gunfire. Outside her door, there's shouting – most of in German, some of it in Spanish – and a group of men takes off down the hall.

She leans against the wall by her door, listening. The explosions have stopped, but the gunfire hasn't, and it's getting closer. She crouches, conserving her limited energy but ready to move. Suddenly, there's another explosion, and the wall opposite her door collapses.

Sharon hesitates only a heartbeat before running out of the room. The explosion took out an outside wall, freeing not just herself but also a dozen other prisoners.

Unfortunately, the compound wall is still standing, and it's a much larger distance than she'd like to try to run unarmed. Looking around, she discovers that the explosion also exposed a room with an open door to the hallway.

The hallway itself is empty. All the guards must have left to deal with whoever was attacking the compound, obviously not at all concerned for their prisoners. "Nice," she says to herself. It's barely a whisper – she hasn't spoken in months – but it startles her.

She tries to navigate the hallway, but she'd only been shown a small part of the compound before her flimsy CIA cover fell apart. She tries to remember the turns they took on the way to the room she'd been locked up in, but she'd been blinded-folded, and she suspects they took a few extra turns to throw her off.

Just as she nears a corner, she hears shouting and the echo of boots running down the hall. The latest explosion must have drawn the guards back down to the prisoner rooms. Peaking around the corner, she notes that one man is much closer to her than the rest and that there are only three of them. More will come, she knows, but if she can take out these three, she'll at least have weapons.

As the first guard comes around the corner, his throat meets her fist. Sharon shoves her knee into his stomach as hard as she can, and he doubles over. She finds his knife and pries his gun from his hands. She hits him over the head with the gun.

The guard collapses just as the two other men discover her. She recognizes them both – two men who took personal delight in torturing her, one who had been an agent of SHIELD – and puts a bullet in each of their heads without hesitating. She empties their magazines, stuffs their extra rounds into the waistband of her pants, and pockets their knives.

 

She makes her way down hallways, picking off guards as they find her. She's just found her way to an area of the compound she recognizes, two guards lying unconscious behind her, when she sees him:

Bucky Barnes. The Winter Soldier. Steve Rogers' best friend. They pause, staring. All that time chasing him, and now they're standing just a few feet away from each other. Sharon might have laughed at that, if one of the guards hadn't chosen that moment to come to and lunge at her. She kicks him off of her, sending him skidding across the floor to Barnes' feet, but not before he stabs her in the side.

She hisses at the pain. It's a small wound, maybe an inch deep. But she's barely eaten in weeks, and even the smallest blood loss pushes her over the edge. As she struggles not to collapse, Barnes hits the guard over the head, knocking him out again. Then he grabs her arm, throwing it over his shoulder, and drags her into a nearby room.

He closes the door, then eases her onto the floor before putting his weight against the door. He tears the bottom of his shirt and ties it tight around her wound. "That'll work for a bit, but..." But she needs to get out of there. "Follow this hallway until you reach the end. Turn right. It'll take you to a side entrance, not far from the compound wall." Barnes grins, which may just be the most shocking things that's happened to Sharon in the last year. "There's a hole there."

Sharon finds herself grinning too, although it may be the starvation and blood loss making her delirious. "Listen," she says, "You need to stop running from Steve."

Barnes' grin disappears. "I can't. Not yet. I have to deal with this first. I have to deal with the people who did this to me, who made me into a thing."

Sharon shakes her head. "I think you have to give him a little more credit than that. It's not like he doesn't know what it's like to have someone slap a trademark on you."

The smile returns, just a little. "Do you know him well?"

"No," Sharon says. "Just the stories."

 

 

Barnes clears a path for her, leading the guards down the opposite hallway. Sharon takes a breath, gathers every ounce of strength Peggy Carter has ever poured into her, and runs to the compound wall and through the hole.

 

Natasha Romanoff is leaning against the wall on the opposite side. "Really?" Sharon says, gesturing to the compound. "You couldn't have helped?"

"Knew you could handle it." She lifts the bottom of Sharon's shirt. "Did you get _stabbed_ , Carter?" She puts Sharon's arm over her shoulders, leading her into the treeline.

"If you're not here to rescue me, why are you here?"

"Rogers was having trouble tracking the Winter Soldier. He wanted me to see if I could get any closer."

Sharon glances back at the compound, "Looks like you found him."

"He seems busy." Natasha shrugs. "When I followed him here, I didn't realize they were holding former SHIELD operatives hostage. Then a handful of them ran through here."

"Didn't Fury know I was here?"

"Fury's upper-level CIA contact told him you were dead. A couple of the other agents who escaped tonight were also supposed to be dead. I had a hunch."

"Good hunch."

"Might be time to leave the CIA though. When we get back home, you should call Phil Coulson."

 

They walk in silence for a while. They move downhill, following a creek. Sharon tries to walk on her own, but soon Natasha is shouldering most of her weight.

Finally, they come to a clearing. An SUV is waiting, Sam Wilson perched on top. He bangs on the roof. A moment later, Steve steps out.

He crosses the clearing, taking Sharon's arm from Natasha's shoulder and putting it on his own. "Come on, Sharon," he says, helping her walk the last few steps to the SUV. "I've got you."


End file.
